Monday, September 21, 2009

what's up the pike: just one 'day' this year

- If you've got plans this Saturday, skip them and go to the 19th Annual Burtonsville Day Celebration. There's a full day of events, with a charity walk through the Greencastle Lakes neighborhood at 8am, a parade up Old Columbia Pike at 10am (in which I resume my job of driving the official George Leventhal float - er, SUV) and a festival at the Praisner Center with food, performances and an auto show. For more updates, check out the Burtonsville Day fan page on Facebook.

- And in Silver Spring, the Magical Montgomery Festival returns for the ninth year on Ellsworth Drive. Attractions include more food, more live entertainment, and so-called "mini-parades," which sounds kinda disappointing to me (wink wink). For a preview, check out a slideshow from last year's event, or RSVP on Facebook.

- The oft-discussed but slow-moving revitalization of Wheaton takes center stage next week with a series of meetings. On Monday, Park and Planning holds an open house to discuss the Wheaton CBD Sector Plan, which lays out the next two decades of development in the business district. That's at 7pm in the Charles Gilchrist Cultural Center, 11319 Elkin Street.

- And on Thursday, the Urban Land Institute talks about how to revive the CBD at 5pm, followed by a presentation at 7pm of plans to build a mixed-use complex atop the Safeway at Georgia and Reedie similar to the CityVista project in the District. Both of those meetings are at the Crossway Community Center at 3015 Upton Drive in Kensington.

- Speaking of Wheaton: D.C. United has already mentioned interest in putting a soccer arena there, and now another group trying to build a sports arena in MoCo says they're looking for sites in the vaguely-defined "midcounty", which (much like the definition of "East County") could mean anything that's not on a county or state line. What they do say is the location's "near transit," which sounds a lot like Wheaton to me.